The Extremely Abbreviated Adventures of the Griffis Family in China: November 10-18, 2010
The Extremely Abbreviated Adventures of the Griffis Family in China (Days 6-10)
Day 6: We visit Tiananmen Square and the Forbidden City. Both are extraordinarily vast and impressive and hard to describe or get good pictures of because of their vast impressiveness. The former is magnificently austere, the latter magnificently ornate. We also get to see “new” Beijing in the form of a vast urban mall for lunch (San Francisco readers, imagine the Westfield, with all Chinese food and only a slightly more skewed ratio of Chinese to Anglo diners.) That night Guangsho takes us out for Peking duck, yum yum.
Day 7: Eric spends the morning talking to people at Peking University. Owen and I spend the morning wandering the university grounds with our guide for the day, whose English is, alas, extremely limited, to the point that conversation is pretty much nonexistent. We meet a Canadian woman with a toddler who takes us to a nearby playground, so Owen is happy, anyway. We spend the afternoon at the Summer Palace, which is really not a single palace in the Western sense, but an enormous parkland dotted with temples, gazebos, and other buildings, along with a central artificial lake built on what I can only call a Disneyesque scale. It is freezing cold and we get harpied mildly by a couple of Chinese grannies for Owen’s lack of long underwear (Eric has to carry him the whole way, and his trousers inevitably ride up and leave his lower legs bare). That night we go to the Chaoyang Theater for an acrobatics show. I wish I could honestly write that it was the most spectacularly amazing such display I have ever seen, but we will have to settle for “very good.” Damn you, Cirque du Soleil, for making me so jaded.
Day 8: Eric spends most of the day at the Institute for Botany. Owen and I spend most of the day sleeping and watching TV. I have high hopes of seeing the Temple of Heaven in the afternoon (which is familiar, in miniature replica form, to the Disney veterans out there as the building in Epcot’s China pavilion where they have the circle-vision movie). Beijing’s horrible traffic, however, prevents us by mere minutes from getting there before closing time. The park grounds are still open, so we take a dusk stroll and afterwards check out the Toy Market across the street (next door to the more famous Pearl Market, and more useful for Christmas presents for Owen). For the first and only time on the trip, we are out in Beijing without a Chinese guide. Yay! We take the Metro back across town, also for the first and only time on the trip. It is, as my neighbor on the plane said, well signed and really not much more difficult to figure out than an unfamiliar subway system in an American city. It also costs us 4 yuan, about 40 pence. To humor Owen, we go to a Western restaurant recommended in my Beijing guidebook for dinner.
Day 9: Eric leaves early for the Institute for Biophysics. Owen and I are picked up by our guide for the day, Ting Ting, who takes us to the Beijing Zoo. We see the panda exhibit (7 pandas!), and the lions and tigers, but Owen is only excited about the aquarium, which is newer and, truthfully, much nicer than the rest of the zoo. The highlight for him is the dolphin show, which is exactly like every American dolphin show you have ever seen, right down to the cheesy faux-tropical set with a thatched building labeled “Paradise Hotel” at center stage. We had planned to take him to another paleontology museum in the afternoon to see more dinosaur bones, but after lunch he is much too tired to do anything but go back to the hotel and sleep. That night we have a last feast with Long’s family and an Emory professor that Eric knows from his grad school days, who is currently staying in Beijing.
Day 10: The air quality is utterly appalling this morning; the smog appears not to have lifted at all overnight. You would think there was a wildfire a few blocks away. Our departure from Beijing airport is uneventful. Owen sleeps for the first three hours of the flight, thanks to some anti-nausea medication. I get to watch movies! First Inception, which I enjoyed but sort of wondered what all the fuss was about. It’s basically a well-done heist film with some sci-fi window dressing and maybe the least surprising “surprise” ending I’ve ever seen. Then Gladiator II: Thugs in Tights – oops, I mean Robin Hood with Russell Crowe. The on-demand entertainment system cut out about halfway through that one, which irritated me for about five minutes, until I realized that I wasn’t actually enjoying the film much anyway. The pacing is pre-global-warming glacial and the acting is almost as cheesy as the Kevin Costner version, without any of the fun. Back through Heathrow and the short flight to Edinburgh. Davey picks us up, thank goodness we don’t have to drive. We get home around 8 p.m. local time and collapse. Hooray for a fantastic trip!
Life in brief since our return: Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year's, moving from Broughty Ferry to Carnoustie, getting increasingly pregnant. Expect the next post and the next many to follow to be baby-related.
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